Post permalink

Has anyone here used DevExpress XAF? I've been using it for a while and I'm of the opinion that its implementation is quite flawed. I'm looking for maybe a different opinion to rescue my time/investment into it. The idea behind XAF is great and one that will probably be the way to go sometime in the future, but for right now, in its current state, and judging by past updates by DevExpress, it's not "there" yet and probably wont be "there" for a long while.

For those not familiar with XAF, I'll try to summarize what it is. XAF is a commercial business application framework sold/developed by DevExpress which integrates their suite of windows or web controls (you get to choice to build your app as a web app or windows forms app at any time). You write your application by typing out .NET ORM classes (they have a ton of keyboard macros to make this task ultra fast and correct), and XAF attempts to build an entire end to end application for you using modules such as security, reporting, charts, input validation, audit history and more ...

If it worked correctly the great things about it would be that a developer could write business classes and get a bunch of functionality right out of the shoe. Features such as user login, user profiles/back end user management, fairly fully featured ORM class level security, visual record filtering, google like record searching, grid sorting/grouping, pivot charts, validation of input and so on (and actually quite a lot more stuff) all provided to you, the developer, nearly automatically. And if it worked correctly the idea would be that all projects from everyone using XAF would share a well tested/performant codebase, and easy or nearly automatic drop in access to many business application features.

Unfortunately the problem with XAF is scalability (the web version struggles when you add 4 or more users), performance, complete lack of work flow, constantly outdated/poor documentation, and many other minor/major pains.

In my opinion the concept behind XAF is the next logical and obvious step for most all business programming, but DevExpress is not capable of the daunting task that is fixing all the problems they create.